Adrian Gonzalez Asks Dodgers For Extra Time Off - RealGM Wiretap
Adrian Gonzalez had extra time off this weekend after requesting a break from Dave Roberts.

Gonzalez is hitting just .173 with a .212 slugging percentage for the Los Angeles Dodgers over his last 14 games.

"I was going to give him one day and he came in the other night and said Wholesale NFL Jerseys , 'Maybe two days might be better for me mentally,'" Roberts said. "It's rare for him so for him to come in, and it's never easy to ask for an extra day, he's a guy that wants to be out there every single day, but to help the club moving forward it might be good for him to take two days."

Gonzalez has played at least 156 of the season's 162 games in each of the last 10 years, yet he has already been absent from four of the Dodgers' 77 games this year.

Walt Jocketty doesn't think the Cincinnati Reds are that far away from contending and is planning to "retool" this winter.

The Reds traded away pitchers Mike Leake and Johnny Cueto at the July deadline to help build for the future.

"This was the time you kind of step back and rebuild it a little ... not rebuild, but retool," Jocketty said. "We're not that far away."

Jocketty says Cincinnati will look to add at least one veteran pitcher this offseason and perhaps more.

Rich Hill Was Looking For Two Year $28M Extension - RealGM Wiretap

The Oakland Athletics discussed an extension with Rich Hill before trading him to the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Hill is believed to have been seeking a deal in the range of $28 million over two seasons.

Oakland has re-signed pitchers after trading them at midseason before.

锘? When talking about intelligent design, we are not talking about the creation of man. Nope, this is more important! The creation of your media and site products.

There are some very basic things about design that one can learn that can vastly improve one's ability to make appealing and intelligent creations. Some of those things are:

1. Lining Things Up

2. Using Variation

3. Giving Breathing Room

4. Using the Grid

5. The Golden Section

6. Lining Things Up

Things that line up look nice. Things that are all over the place don't look nice. Of course, one must know rules to know which ones to break, so these rules are only guidelines. In general though, straight orsmooth lines are appealing. Jagged and inconsistent lines are less likely to be appealing. A design with many elements lining up and a few elements that don't can create nice contrast, yet starting with things that line up is a nice easy rule for beginners.

To support these statements, lets look at examples of man-made objects. Roads, desks, walls, buildings, orange juice containers. The forms of all these objects are straight or consistent and any deviation from this norm is considered mildly repulsive. On roads, the matter is quite important to health. There is a merge under construction from the 60 East (that's how we identify freeways here in California) to the 215 South Wholesale Jerseys Cheap , where the turn starts at one size circumstance then abruptly veers a few degrees tighter to another sized circumstance. This slight change in curvature results in a driver having to adjust for this change with a slight, and apparently unexpected, turn of the wheel. I say apparently because road barriers prevent a driver from seeing the whole turn going into it and there are a bunch of tire marks etched up the construction barrier right at the point of the change in curvature.

Lets look at desks. Obviously straight and even desks are good for writing, fit against straight walls well and look nice, at least to me. Buildings, like desks are convenient shapes for space efficiency, map drawing, road creation, furniture and room modularity. Sure, curved buildings are beautiful too, yet the curves are often very even, and more often than not, the curve is accompanied by a straight line in another dimension.

OK, orange juice - very nice to ship little square boxes. Long rectangles make a nice canvas for marketing. If the straight lines are not straight, but crumpled or dented, chances are you won't buy that carton.

All of these are man-made objects that benefit in usability from straight or evenly curved lines. Lets take a look at nature. Trees are basically straight lines. The trunks of a redwood forest all go in one direction with remarkable consistency. (That direction is up, by the way, unless you are on the opposite side of the Earth, in which case it would be down.) Again, this is usability for the tree - a competition in height to get to the sun. Leaves - straight veins out to the tips - same idea Wholesale Jerseys Free Shipping , get some (light). Curvature of the earth - smoother than the curvature of an 8 ball. Something to do with gravity which, for existence as we know it, is quite useful.

OK, OK, but how does this apply to my intelligent ___________ (fill in the blank - web site, ad, package design, solar electric car, hair)? For your designs, line up your stuff in straight lines. Line up images so that image edges are lined up with image edges and lines, text with text, and other elements inline with other elements. This is a fundamental design principle yet, some websites are all over the place with every image and section of text every which way.

Using Variation

Things that line up and have no variation are boring. For example, straight long roads with no turns are quite boring. The 58 zigzags across the arid Southern California desert, between mountains, with every few miles a turn. The 5 goes in one straight line for mile after mile after hour after hours. Which would you rather drive?